Emission levels within the factory have not been measured even though the Inspectorate's own medical officer certified an incriminatingly high incidence of cases of nasal septum perforations and dermatitis after examining some of the factory's 250 workers. The workers themselves report gangrene and lung and kidney ailments as well.

The normal response in such a situation would be to shut down the factory until the working environment was brought into conformity with legal standards. But who is going to do that? Government agencies are not made accountable to anyone. Proprietors will remainindifferent as long as regulations are not enforced and unions are ineffective. So, as long as there are more poor, illiterate people outside the factory gates looking for jobs, those inside will be treated as expendable, as a subhuman species for whom no one need take responsibility.

It has taken the cyclone disaster at Kandla to prove just how invisible Indian workers can be to state agencies. Even one month later, no one knows for certain how many people, mostly migrants from UP and Bihar, lived in the Shirwa labour camp and worked in the salt-pans, or how many died in the tidal wave. The Gujarat government's total figure is 1,000 dead but unofficial estimates are ten times higher.

Many of those cremated on the beach have no names. Neither the bureaucracy nor salt-pan owners maintained records. If survivors want to claim compensation for their lost relatives, they have to prove their identities from the ashes and bones on the beach.

According to a new study, more than half the children born in Indiaare not registered at birth. In UP, Bihar and Rajasthan as few as 20 per cent is registered. One can follow their movement from there to migrant labour camps in more enterprising states where they continue to remain invisible to those who employ them and those required to regulate their workplaces and living conditions.

At every conceivable point where the state can intervene to give these people a chance for a better life, there is abysmal failure. The backward states are falling behind on every count from education and health care to the welfare of women and children. Prosperity in states like Gujarat is not accompanied by a greater concern for those at the bottom of the ladder who tend more and more to be people from outside the state.

The eternal question is why a country with great technical, organisational and financial resources is unable to cope with the rudimentary issue of giving its poorest people a decent life. As always, the answer is that the fault lies with a political class which is secondto none in its callousness, hypocrisy and obsession with power.